Sunday, June 29, 2014

Good Morning Jacob

Letter to my SonSunday, 29 June

Dogpatch

Good Morning
Jacob…

Drawing was
never any good for me unless I was not my usual self. I could never think my way through anything I did. What I wanted to do was readily available for
me to see or feel beforehand or it was never there at all. It had to all be made up. I haven’t the skill or patience to work from
life, to attempt to portray what I see in front of me. It’s about basic shapes and colors and maybe
some music to help stir the pot within.
Things are sort of spilled on the paper.
There are plenty of mistakes. Nothing
I do is ever really finished. So long as
a drawing is within reach it is susceptible to change. Sometimes they improve. Other times I disaster them. It can be depressing. Occasionally, I try to undisaster them. It’s been known to work but most of the time
the result just further sinks beneath its awkward ways. There are so many false starts. I’ve created a field of debris. How good it feels when I’m happy with
something I’ve done. Those moments are few. It’s like capturing a lightening bug in
November when there aren’t supposed to be any lightening bugs flying about. Darkness settles in but a small light burns
off and on within my jar.

Basic colors
have rewards. They each appear to have a
distinct personality. One finding of interest
to me is that a particular color may reveal a certain personality in one
setting and then show a surprising different turn of character when placed in a
wholly separate context. Let’s take a
color of blue; one we might associate with a summer sky over the tumbling of
surf upon sand. How this blue feels depends upon the company it keeps. Coupled with a sedate yellow I might find
this blue giving me the scent of honeysuckle while on a first date. Were the same blue to cozy up against a
brooding red then my pleasant blue becomes more willful. The light joy of walking hand in hand with faded
ochre has now become more of an impassioned embrace. It’s serious business between these two, red
and blue.

I rarely
listen to the words of a song. Images in
my drawings often don’t count for much. They can merely
be a starting point. A wheel is an
approximation of a circle. A building is
little more than a box. A path is a
meandering line. They provide my excuse
to record the path my mind plots through the movement of my hand. The forms must have meaning but I know not
what. Should it matter to me? I think not.
If you view a dance from some distance the impression left is that of
the group. It’s the play of men and
women together. Together they are the vessel that
holds the charm. Ideally the various
items in my drawing best serve the interest of making something whole. Have they come to dance? Can I see the music? A false note is like stubbing my toe. The melody is lost to the pain of stumbling
over today’s misguided debris. What a
colossal waste of time it has all been.
What conceit. Trash.